What would you even fight with a battleship in this day and age, Kavekk?

One of the navies you'd lose wholesale to, or one of the ones you can beat with a missile frigate?

Battleships are still great for ordinance delivery to shore targets. I'd rather send a $3,000 16" shell at a target and obliterate it into a large crater than send a $1,000,000 cruise missile to do the same thing. The naval rail gun project has a working gun, it shoots, it stands up to repeated shootings without destroying the barrel, and it would be very cost effective to operate. Now that the panama canal has been dredged to "post panamax" standards, they should dust off the Montana class battleship plans, update them, put the whole thing on a ford class aircraft carrier hull form with a few extra A1B reactors, and then give it to the marines. Armor the crap out of it to guard against conventional shipkillers, don't worry about nukes because if someone nukes your navy, it's ww-III anyways and the missiles will do the rest. You have something that could put 12 16-19" shells down range every 15 seconds, with a magazine that can't explode, and with an ammo cost of approximatly whatever a handful of scrap engine blocks costs these days per shot. I like airplanes. I like missiles because they fly, Drones are neat too. But we should be building one really expensive battleship rather than flying 30 equally expensive aircraft to do the same job at 80 times the cost.

I don't get the point in trying to act like you're varus. Unless it's your ultimate goal in life to mildly annoy and/or bore people I guess.

____________________________

Theophany wrote:YOU'RE AN ELITIST @#%^ AETHIEN, NO WONDER YOU HAVE NO FRIENDS AND PEOPLE HATE YOU. someproteinguy wrote:Aethien you take more terrible pictures than a Japanese tourist. Astarin wrote:One day, Maz, you'll learn not to click on anything Aeth links.

After tuning the tech and increasing production numbers, drones will be more affordable for inland small ops targets. Which makes much smaller drone carriers viable.

There is realistically no place for conventional battleships at present.

Once we have strong railguns, they will have a role for sustained barrage fire, but they will require nicer AA/sub screening ships, otherwise they are much too vulnerable.

This is all assuming we don't go the heavy distributed support direction like we have with our airforce; which would look something like a primarily electric craft, composing of single railgun destroyers, ultralight drone carriers, and nuclear generator ships fitted with additional detection/comm eq) to fuel the rest. The obvious hole here is AA, but current ACCs with fielded with something much better against sukhois than JSFs; ie dedicated AA craft. Current DARPA R&D points to light laser strikers with heavier BVR missile support. This strategic direction has the advantage of requiring very little resupply, along with deployment flexibility.

What are you babbling about? Maybe my English isn't what it should be. It's like you people are speaking English but it's like your talking in some kind *** liberal code. I suppose that's a good thing if I knew what you were talking about I'd probably think obama's great as well. Well one things certain; it's all bushes fault.

What would you even fight with a battleship in this day and age, Kavekk?

One of the navies you'd lose wholesale to, or one of the ones you can beat with a missile frigate?

Battleships are still great for ordinance delivery to shore targets. I'd rather send a $3,000 16" shell at a target and obliterate it into a large crater than send a $1,000,000 cruise missile to do the same thing. The naval rail gun project has a working gun, it shoots, it stands up to repeated shootings without destroying the barrel, and it would be very cost effective to operate. Now that the panama canal has been dredged to "post panamax" standards, they should dust off the Montana class battleship plans, update them, put the whole thing on a ford class aircraft carrier hull form with a few extra A1B reactors, and then give it to the marines. Armor the crap out of it to guard against conventionaal shipkillers, don't worry about nukes because if someone nukes your navy, it's ww-III anyways and the missiles will do the rest. You have something that could put 12 16-19" shells down range every 15 seconds, with a magazine that can't explode, and with an ammo cost of approximatly whatever a handful of scrap engine blocks costs these days per shot. I like airplanes. I like missiles because they fly, Drones are neat too. But we should be building one really expensive battleship rather than flying 30 equally expensive aircraft to do the same job at 80 times the cost.

And do we do all this before or after all the defense spending ts on the table? All this really doesn't matter anyway. No chance we'll use heavy machinery against muslims while obama's in office.

Funny that you spend more time debating whether I'm this guy varus than you do talking about the fact that the obama administration knew about these attacks day's in advance.

Cite?

____________________________

publiusvarus wrote:

we all know liberals are well adjusted american citizens who only want what's best for society. While conservatives are evil money grubbing scum who only want to sh*t on the little man and rob the world of its resources.

Supposedly Libyan officials told US officials a few days prior that they were concerned about some Anti-American extremist sects. They did not, as crazyvaruswhoever implies, say "Hey, we have a hot tip that the consulate in Benghazi will be attacked on 9/11..."

After tuning the tech and increasing production numbers, drones will be more affordable for inland small ops targets. Which makes much smaller drone carriers viable.

There is realistically no place for conventional battleships at present.

Once we have strong railguns, they will have a role for sustained barrage fire, but they will require nicer AA/sub screening ships, otherwise they are much too vulnerable.

This is all assuming we don't go the heavy distributed support direction like we have with our airforce; which would look something like a primarily electric craft, composing of single railgun destroyers, ultralight drone carriers, and nuclear generator ships fitted with additional detection/comm eq) to fuel the rest. The obvious hole here is AA, but current ACCs with fielded with something much better against sukhois than JSFs; ie dedicated AA craft. Current DARPA R&D points to light laser strikers with heavier BVR missile support. This strategic direction has the advantage of requiring very little resupply, along with deployment flexibility.

A litoral ship is designed for close in shore work. attacking pirates in somalian waters, spraying beaches with small arms, etc. It's the modern navy equivelent of a frigate, both in size and in throw weight. A 2.5 inch gun is a popgun compared to a 16 inch battleship shell, and a littoral ship is essentially useless as a shore bombardment platform unless you include their missile capability. Even if there are more drones, they still fire very expensive missiles compared to a cheap solid chunk of metal. Though i agree that small drone carriers, probably built on an America/wasp class marine carrier hull are a given in the near future. But the point remains, a battleship is THE single most cost effective shore bombardment platform we know of. Even aircraft carrying dumb gravity bombs are more expensive simply due to expended fuel.

An iowa class battleship, retrofitted to modern standards with current generation engines (conventional or nuclear) wouldn't be all that vulnerable. You could actually get about 20 CIWS Phalanx mounts on the old Bofors 50mm antiaircraft mounting points if you really wanted, which would make them very difficult to hit with missiles. Radar signature would be a problem unless they did a redesign of most of the topside and a recoat with radar absorbing paint, but you generally don't try to hide a battleship anyways, and in a shore bombardment role, we already control the immidiate sea area. Torpedos would be a problem, though i'd probably retrofit the battleship with stabilization pontons to allow for larger guns and higher muzzle velocities and use them as anti torpedo blisters of a sort. Between that, and the kinds of reactive armor we can build these days (see the M1-A2 Abrahms) means it would be very difficult to kill a battleship short of a nuke, and if we're talking nukes, our entire fleet is vulnerable.

Supposedly Libyan officials told US officials a few days prior that they were concerned about some Anti-American extremist sects.

Those exist in Libya?

____________________________

publiusvarus wrote:

we all know liberals are well adjusted american citizens who only want what's best for society. While conservatives are evil money grubbing scum who only want to sh*t on the little man and rob the world of its resources.

Supposedly Libyan officials told US officials a few days prior that they were concerned about some Anti-American extremist sects. They did not, as crazyvaruswhoever implies, say "Hey, we have a hot tip that the consulate in Benghazi will be attacked on 9/11..."

What do you consider a hot tip?

Quote:

"Hey, we have a hot tip that the consulate in Benghazi will be attacked on 9/11..."

Supposedly Libyan officials told US officials a few days prior that they were concerned about some Anti-American extremist sects. They did not, as crazyvaruswhoever implies, say "Hey, we have a hot tip that the consulate in Benghazi will be attacked on 9/11..."

What do you consider a hot tip? And it was top libyan officials not just your average secretary gossip

I hear Obama is still blaming the video and has even sent the secret service to arrest him.

Reminds me of a guy who had month and months of hot tips from top ranking officials in real Nations like the UK, Russia, Germany about potential attacks using hijacked planes.

So you don't agree that it would have been a good idea to protect the embassy from attack on 911?

Is this you running away from the "They knew all about it" goal posts?

It would have been a good idea to direct an orbital laser cannon at our embassy in France, had a giant robot attacked it. But one didn't, so it wouldn't. The question is whether or not there was actionable information to warrant additional security (and what that security would have been; you bring in soldiers to a diplomatic outpost at the pleasure of the host nation).

Supposedly Libyan officials told US officials a few days prior that they were concerned about some Anti-American extremist sects. They did not, as crazyvaruswhoever implies, say "Hey, we have a hot tip that the consulate in Benghazi will be attacked on 9/11..."

What do you consider a hot tip?

Quote:

"Hey, we have a hot tip that the consulate in Benghazi will be attacked on 9/11..."

So you don't agree that it would have been a good idea to protect the embassy from attack on 911?

Is that what you call effective leadership?

It's a pretty thin string you're going out on to try and lay blame on our own administration for this attack.

If you were an effective leader would you have evacuated the embassies before 9-11?

Supposedly Libyan officials told US officials a few days prior that they were concerned about some Anti-American extremist sects.

Those exist in Libya?

Gaddafi loyalists. You know, all those guys who lost their jobs when the US helped oust their administration.

Though, calling them extremists is moderately funny.

Ok, I realize that I was being bit too obtuse. My point being that there is a lot of anti-American sentiment around, and that random attacks may be imminent at any given time. "Concerns" about attacks may well be too vague or unsubstantiated to lock down or evacuate all personnel in the region, although the date in question does deserve a bit of extra attention. Besides, I wonder what kind of insider info varus has to claim Obama knew all about it. I doubt it came up while shooting hoops with the brothers on base.

____________________________

publiusvarus wrote:

we all know liberals are well adjusted american citizens who only want what's best for society. While conservatives are evil money grubbing scum who only want to sh*t on the little man and rob the world of its resources.

To make a long story short, I don't take any responsibility for anything I post here. It's not news, it's not truth, it's not serious. It's parody. It's satire. It's bitter. It's angsty. Your mother's a *****. You like to jack off dogs. That's right, you heard me. You like to grab that dog by the bone and rub it like a ski pole. Your dad? ***. Your priest? Straight. **** off and let me post. It's not true, it's all in good fun. Now go away.

we all know liberals are well adjusted american citizens who only want what's best for society. While conservatives are evil money grubbing scum who only want to sh*t on the little man and rob the world of its resources.